The twenty-five papers, taken from a Cardiff conference in 1998, are concerned with Insular art in its broadest sense, encompassing studies of metalwork, manuscripts, sculpture and textiles, both recent discoveries and new investigations of well-known objects. They include material associated with Anglo-Saxon England as well as early Medieval Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and discoveries of Insular metalwork in Scandinavia. They are divided into five themes which reflect the many recent advances in the study of Insular art.

Reports of two church excavations, St Martin-at-Palace, Norwich and St Michael, Bowthorpe, undertaken prior to their re-building and re-use. The reports cover the earliest evidence for occupation of the site and the phases of re-building, repair and ruin (in the case of St Michael's) from the Anglo-Saxon period through to their present state.

This is another in the famous Knight series by the renowned medieval historian Ewart Oakeshott. Explore another fascinating dimension of medieval warfare in this engaging account of knights and their various kinds of armor. Oakeshott focuses on the armor of the later Middle Ages, from 1100 to 1500. He examines how armor developed, how craftsmen made the important garments, and he looks in detail at the different kinds of helmets and which were the best. He also looks at the other important aspects of a knight's armor and finishes up with a discussion of how the armor was worn. Along the way he dispels a number of myths about medieval armor. Originally published in 1961-and of interest to young and older readers-this updated and revised edition of A Knight and His Armor has an extensive and useful glossary. Accurately illustrated by the author, the book captures the wonder and magic of a past time. "Oakeshott here provides a detailed history of how armor developed, how and of what it was made, and how it was worn." - Library Journal

An exploration of the links between the languages, cultures and traditions of the Celtic peoples of Ireland and Britain through an analysis of literary sources, place or people names and the Gaelic language. Twenty-six English, Gaelic or French essays, include extracts from Celtic texts, accompanied by detailed commentaries, and comparisons between these three main areas of influence.

^Aby Beric Morley and David Gurney ^DThis book starts with a wide-ranging overview of Castle Rising, going on to review the archaeological evidence, in conjunction with comment on the archaeological explorations themselves, for the site from prehistoric times up to the post-medieval period. Three chapters are devoted to finds, including coins, building materials, pottery and zoological evidence. The development of the main building and its surrounds is fully documented, and the entire text is amply supplemented by illustrations.

Nineteen papers on early medieval Irish and Welsh texts. Contents include: St Patrick in Cornwall? The origin and transmission of Vita Tertia S. Patricii ( David Dumville ); Re-reading Dafydd ap Gwilym ( Patrick Ford ); The spoils of Annwn: Taliesin and material poetry ( Sarah Lynn Higley ); Aldfirth of Northumbria and the learning of a sapiens ( Colin Ireland ); Narrative openers and progress markers in Irish ( Proinsias Mac Cana ); The Hagiographic poetics of Canu Cadfan ( Catherine McKenna ); The introduction of alphabetic writing to Ireland ( Michael Richter ); Daring young men in their chariots ( Joseph Falaky Nagy ); The Celtic bard ( J. E. Caerwyn Bard ).

Do you know why the circular stairs in castles ascended clockwise? Have you ever wondered where the toilets were, or how they worked? Do you know what the best way to attack a castle was? Can you guess why hundreds of pigs would be slaughtered in order to conquer a castle? Ewart Oakeshott knows, and you will too when you finish this book. He is the foremost authority on Medieval weaponry, and in this book he provides a lively and informative history of Europe's castles. Superbly illustrated by the author, he traces the design, building, and defense of castles throughout the Middle Ages, and explores the castle armory, daily life, the training of boys to become knights (including their lessons in both the arts of warfare and courtly behavior), sieges, and favorite pastimes such as hunting and hawking. "This delightful little work does admirably what it sets out to do..So well done that it deserves a place in the library purely as an elementary work of reference." - School Librarian

Ships and shipbuilding were important elements of Viking culture and a precondition for trade, warfare and conquest. The important excavations at the Viking towns of Hedeby and Schleswig-Holstein revealed a rich body of finds of wrecks and parts of ships. This is a report on this material and also examines the role of the towns as ports and the role of trading in their development.

A hoard of coins of the shadowy East Anglian King Beonna triggered off a project which revealed not only late Neolithic activity but also a Viking burial and a small part of a rural settlement of the 8th to 13th centuries AD. Saturation coverage by metal detector at all stages of the work produced a large assemblage of metal objects which suggests that the 'normal' quantity and range of finds collected from conventionally excavated sites may often fall short of the true population.

This is the first of a number of volumes describing the 1980-86 excavations at the early medieval Benedictine abbey of San Vincenzo al Volturno in central Italy. This volume gives a general introduction to this important project, a description of the archaeological remains, and then detailed accounts of the excavation of the Carolingian Crypt Church, the `South Church', the Refectory, the Garden Court and the Entrance Hall. Also included is a reappraisal of the cycle of paintings in the crypt in the light of the excavations.

The brief title doesn't really reflect the wealth of information in the three reports in this book. Arising from the British School at Rome's archaeological survey in southern Etruria between 1950 and 1975, they provide important evidence for the transition years between Roman and Medieval. Santa Cornelia, the abandoned site of a medieval monastic seat built from and among the remains of Roman buildings, yielded detailed information about the background, origins and development of the monastery; at Santa Rufina, the traditional site of the burial and centre of the cult of the third century martyr Rufina, excavations revealed a chapel, defensive walls, piazza and timber huts, part of a medieval settlement, overlying a late Roman mausoleum and catacombs, and earlier buildings; at San Liberato the fabric of the surviving church is recorded and analysed to determine its history and development from the early Middle Ages. All reports carry full accounts of the finds, sculptures and inscriptions.

Text in German. Over a 20 year period, the excavations at Illerup in eastern Jutland have brought to light a sacrificial deposit of more than 1500 Iron Age weapons, Roman as well as Germanic. The first two volumes form part of the excavation report, a chronological framework is sketched out and the weapons from Illerup are compared with finds from other Northern European sites. These third and fourth volumes deal with personal ornaments, shields and swords.

Girolamo Fracastoro (?1478-1553) was a doctor and scientist, as well as a poet. He was born in the northern Italian city of Verona, into a prominent local family. Verona is at one of the crossroads of Europe, and although Fracastoro's whole life was spent in that vicinity, he maintained a wide circle of friends and correspondents, keeping up-to-date with what was going on elsewhere. Two cataclysmic events - the European voyages to the New World, and the sudden appearance and rapid spread of syphilis - are the combined themes of his greatest literary work. The Syphilis , dedicated to Pietro Bembo, became one of the most celebrated poems of the Renaissance. Soon after its publication (in 1530) Fracastoro was hailed as a major Latin poet, an equal of Virgil. In the first two books of Syphilis Fracastoro not only describes in vivid terms the symptoms and known cures for syphilis, but also presents for the first time his theory of 'contagion', a major breakthrough towards modern understanding of disease. He was later to write a scientific prose treatise De Contagione. The third and final book of the Syphilis gives a highly mythical narrative of the landing of Columbus in the New World. His reason for including this American material was not, as we might suppose, that syphilis was brought from the Americas to Europe, but rather that the New World provided Europe with one of the more useful remedies for syphilis, an extract from a native American wood, guaiacum. In spite of its poetic mode, Fracastoro's account draws in some detail on contemporary sources for the European discovery of the New World, as Eatough's notes show. This edition offers a 35-page introduction, text with facing English translation, notes elucidating literary, mythical, geographical and botanical topics, and a word-index of the poem.

Late Latin and Early Romance presents a theory of the relationship between Latin and Romance during the period 400-1250. The central hypothesis is that what we now call 'Medieval Latin' was invented around 800 AD when Carolingian scholars standardised the pronunciation of liturgical texts, and that otherwise what was spoken was simply the local variety of Old French, Old Spanish, etc. Thus, the view generally held before the publication of this work, that 'Latin' and 'Romance' existed alongside each other in earlier centuries, is anachronistic. Before 800, Late Latin was Early Romance. This hypothesis is examined first from the viewpoint of historical linguistics, with particular attention paid to the idea of lexical diffusion (ch. 1), and then (ch. 2) through detailed study of pre-Carolingian texts. Chapter 3 deals with the impact in France of the introduction of standardised Latin by Carolingian scholars, and shows how the earliest texts written in the vernacular resulted from it. The final two chapters turn to the situation in Spain from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries. Ch. 4 suggests, on the evidence of a large variety of texts, that before 1080 the new Latin pronunciation (i.e. Medieval Latin) was not used; Ch. 5 charts the slow spread, as a result of Europeanising reforms, of a distinction between Latin and vernacular Romance between 1080 and 1250. There is an extensive bibliography and full indexes. Wright's controversial book presents a wide range of detailed evidence, with extensive quotation of relevant texts and documents. When it was published in 1982 it challenged established ideas in the fields of Romance linguistics and Medieval Latin. The collectively established facts are however explained better by his theory that Medieval Latin was a revolutionary innovation consequent upon liturgical reform, than by the view that it was a miraculous conservative survival that lasted unchanged for a millennium. Late Latin and Early Romance draws on philological, historical and literary evidence from the medieval period, and on historical linguistics, and is a seminal work in these areas of scholarship.

The International Courtly Literature Society was founded in 1973 to foster the study of all aspects of courtly literature - an interest not limited to European medievalists, although they provide one of the society's main focuses. The ICLS holds triennial international conferences, the third in Liverpool, England in 1980. Professor Glyn Burgess has edited a volume containing about one-third of the papers presented there. He opens it with the three plenary speakers, Charles Muscatine, Alan Deyermond, and John Benton, who illuminate conflicting aspects of life and literature held in tension in the productions of medieval court poets. The remaining 29 contributions represent the principal national literatures discussed at the Congress - English, French, German, Provencal and Spanish - and offer a wide variety of perspectives and approaches to courtly literature, including comparisons between literary and artistic artefacts.